I'm hoping someone can help me with this annoyance - My PC has a SoundBlaster Live card (CT4670) & most of the time I get an annoying "clicking" sound emanating from the speakers, especially when downloading files from the Net. I'm currently running Mint with kernel 2.6.24-16, but it's also been a problem when I ran Ubuntu & Debian on the same machine. Has anyone experienced this problem, & were you able to solve it ? Any help or information would be greatly appreciated.

I hope this is enough information. When this was a Winbloze PC I used the same exact hardware & set of Altec Lansing speakers & never heard the clicking I'm hearing now. I got tired of my PC crashing, so about 7 months ago I started trying different distros, but I'm still kind of a "newb", so I'm not sure where to look or what to change to rectify this situation. I also need to add that it's not a constant clicking, but every 45 seconds or so a click comes through 5 times, then stops, then 45 seconds to a minute later, the same 5 clicks. I kept changing settings yesterday & thought maybe I had fixed it, by changing the sound preferences all to multichannel playback & the sound went away. But today I hear it again. Not sure why...

This seems to be one of the new powerful laptops with double graphics cards and VIA basedThat tells a lot.Your new description changes the situation a bitMeasure the time difference between the clicks for some time and see if it is exactly the same period or find the minimum and maximumThen go into the logs (System logs) and (try to) find something appearing with that periodicity Also you can see writing to the logs when they are open, so maybe you see directly what it isMy preliminary guess is wifi - I think it sends a call about once a minute

Thanks for your reply again. Actually it's a tower that I built, the dual graphics is the ATI card, with an analog & a digital video out. Wi-Fi does sound like it could be the problem, I never had to load any specific drivers or anythng, it just worked "out of the box" no matter what flavor of *Nix I was running. I'll turn the wireless off & use a cable for a day or so & see if the sound goes away. No sense in asking what to do afterward 'til that point.

Sorry it took a few days to reply, cazy busy this time of year. Thanks for your help/suggestions, I really appreciate it.

Well, it turns out that you were right, using a CAT5 cable & disabling wireless made the noise go away. Unfortunately, I'd like to use the wireless card - do you have any suggestions as to how to get rid of the clicking AND use wireless. If I have to use a cable, it's not a big deal - at least not as big a deal as the noise. I can live with using the cable, the clicking I could not.

This is a tricky one and I would have to sit in front of the computer to come closer to a solutionIt's not a normal situation, but the fact that it's a desktop leaves room for components that don't live together well (Hopefully that is not the case in a laptop, but you never know..)I only see one sound card, but the SB Live! EMU10k1 is not an integrated cardIf you have an integrated card that for some reason did not turn up in lspci (because it was turned off ) remove the SB live card and use the integrated and listenIf that's ok then you know that something is happening between the sound and wifi cards - maybe a metallic shield could help - but now we are dangerously close to destroying the whole by mistake....